* An 8-year-old boy died after accidentally shooting himself in the head while firing an Uzi submachine gun under adult supervision at a gun fair.

* Jennifer Hudson's mother and brother were found shot to death last week, and now they have found her dead nephew who was missing.

* Shooting at Arkansas university leaves two dead and a third wounded. All of the victims were African American.

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Ted Stevens career just got flushed down a series of tubes

Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, 84, was convicted of all the felony charges he faced of lying about free home renovations and other gifts from a wealthy oil contractor.

The senator showed no emotion as the jury foreman said "guilty" seven times. After the verdicts, Stevens sat in his chair and stared at the ceiling as attorney Brendan Sullivan put his arm around him.

If he weren't a rich, powerful white guy, he'd be drinking Pruno for 35 years in prison, but he is a rich white guy, so he will most likely not face any jail time. And of course Bush could pardon him.

Despite being a convicted felon, he is not required to drop out of the race or resign from the Senate. If he wins re-election, he can continue to hold his seat because there is no rule barring felons from serving in Congress. The Senate could vote to expel him on a two-thirds vote.

Update: RedState usually provides a dependable look into what the Republican Party is up to. They're more a GOP propaganda outlet than an actual blog. Today, though, they broke with the Republican Party - and with Sarah Palin, who is still supporting her pal/convicted felon Ted Stevens - and have endorsed Mark Begich and Ethan Berkowitz, the Democratic opponent for Alaska's other most corrupt member of Congress, Rep. Don Young.

On Monday, funeral preparations were being made for the 8 people we killed in Syria. Clergy washed the bodies as angry residents chanted, "May God's wrath fall on them. We are taking matters into our own hands", a US military official in Washington told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the political sensitivity of cross-border raids.

It took Christopher Hitchens a while to get warmed up about this farce of a candidate, but it's worth the wait:

This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured. And those who prate of spiritual warfare and demons are not just "people of faith" but theocratic bullies. On Nov. 4, anyone who cares for the Constitution has a clear duty to repudiate this wickedness and stupidity.

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What do the psychotic racists do when they get home from Sarah Palin rallies? They plot a race war, which starts with the robbery of a gun store, and then a massacre at a school in a black neighborhood in Tennessee, where 88 black people would be shot to death, and 14 would be decapitated. "The numbers 88 and 14 are symbolic in the white supremacist community."

After the school massacre, the race warriors would go on a "national killing spree," according to the ATF's Jim Cavanaugh in Nashville, which would end in a failed attempt to assassinate Barack Obama. Really, the failed attempt was part of the plan.

"They said that would be their last, final act — that they would attempt to kill Sen. Obama," Cavanaugh said. "They didn't believe they would be able to do it, but that they would get killed trying."

Excerpt: Law enforcement officials say the intense public interest and historic nature of the vote could lead to violent outbreaks if people are unhappy with the results, encounter problems casting their ballots or suspect voting irregularities.

Police departments say they cannot rule out disorder and are mobilizing extra forces and putting SWAT teams on standby. In Oakland, near San Francisco, police will have tactical squads, SWAT teams and officers trained in riot control on standby.

"This election is going to mark in history a change in the presidency: you're going to have a woman in the presidency or an African American as president. I think everybody around here is voting for Obama, so if he gets in the White House everybody's going to be happy."

We got screwed in 2000 - and we just took it. We got screwed in 2004 because our guy quit.

If we get screwed again, we can count on our Democratic leaders telling us that fighting is wrong, and that we should all just get behind McCain.

Hold on a minute, says David Swanson....

"If your television declares John McCain the president elect on the evening of November 4th, your television will be lying. You should immediately pick up your pre-packed bags and head straight to the White House in Washington, DC, which we will surround and shut down until this attempt at a third illegitimate presidency is reversed. We may be there for days or weeks or months. But we must be there. We must be there by the millions. We must show each other, and the nation, and the world that we have had enough, that we will not stand for one more stolen election, that we will not give in to fear, lies, theft, and intimidation." Link

GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is meeting with the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. as part of a three-city tour in Virginia designed to upend Democrat Barack Obama's lead over Republican John McCain in a state that hasn't backed a Democratic White House hopeful since 1964.

Palin greeted ambassador Sallai Meridor and apologized for not being able to meet with him sooner. She told the ambassador: "We look forward to ... working with your Jewish agency."

'Jewish agency?' What the hell does that even mean?? Is that more Fundie-Speak, or does she think Meridor works with some civic organization like the Chamber Of Commerce?

Yesterday, Obama's campaign stepped up their pushback to Fox News: in response to McCain's latest lie about "spreading the wealth," spokesman Bill Burton called out the biased messenger right along with the dishonest message:

"This is a fake news controversy drummed up by the all too common alliance of Fox News, the Drudge Report and John McCain, who apparently decided to close out his campaign with the same false, desperate attacks that have failed for months. In this seven year old interview, Senator Obama did not say that the courts should get into the business of redistributing wealth at all. Americans know that the real choice in this election is between four more years of Bush-McCain policies that redistribute billions to billionaires and big corporations and Barack Obama's plan to help the middle class by giving tax relief to 95% of workers and companies that create new jobs here in America. That's the change we need, and no amount of eleventh-hour distractions from the McCain campaign will change that," said Obama-Biden campaign spokesman Bill Burton.

We've come a long way. Back in 2007, when Obama dropped out of the Fox news debate, the only reason given was that CNN seemed a more "appropriate venue."

Now that McCain's resorted exclusively to attacks on Obama, the go-to mouthpiece for Republican smears is working overtime. The more they're called out for their bias, the less credibility they'll have to push lies.

Fox isn't news. And as we (potentially) head into a new Democratic administration, it's crucial we make clear that what they broadcast can't be trusted. Great to see Obama continuing this fight.

In recent days, Sarah has begun referring to Obama as "Barack the Wealth Spreader," referring to his proposed tax plan that would provide greater tax relief for lower income individuals than the rich.

She contends that Obama is a socialist who wants to "redistribute" American wealth and argues that his tax plan 'discourages productivity, will punish hard work, and will stifle the entrepreneurial spirit.'

The 'spread the wealth' remarks are ironic, as she recently characterized Alaska's tax code in a very similar way. Just last month, in an interview with Phillip Gourevitch of the New Yorker, Palin explained the windfall profits tax that she imposed on the oil industry in Alaska as a mechanism for ensuring that Alaskans "share the wealth" generated by the oil companies:

"And Alaska - we're set up, unlike other states in the union, here collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs...It's to maximize benefits for Alaskans, not an individual company, not some multinational somewhere, but for Alaskans."

In fact, Alaska's Clear and Equitable Share (ACES) program, which manages redistribution of oil wealth in Alaska, brings in so much money that the state needs no income or sales tax. In addition, this years ACES will provide every Alaskan with a check for $3,200.

And don't forget: Alaska gets the most pork of any state in this country, and it is one of the states that receives more money back from the federal government than it sends to the federal government in taxes.

Makes the days of Chimpy's "20 billion to provide health care for all children is too much money" seem downright quaint.

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A phony Virginia Board of Elections flier is being distributed in Hamption Roads, VA telling Democrats that they are now scheduled to vote on November 5. The flier falsely claims that "an emergency session of the General Assembly" adopted a new voting schedule to "ease the load" at polling places on election day.

Meanwhile, here's a video from Bradblog showing how the vote-flipping in West Virginia is happening.

Why is it the job of the voter to try to make sure the machine casts his/her vote properly? Why is it so difficult? And why are these vote-flips disproportionately FROM the Democrat TO the Republican?

CLEVELAND - Republican John McCain, casting next week's presidential election along partisan and ideological lines, yesterday portrayed Democrat Barack Obama as an old-fashioned liberal who would govern as a dangerous extension of his party's congressional leadership.

"Now this election comes down to how you want your hard-earned money spent," McCain told an audience in a Cleveland hotel ballroom after a meeting with political and business figures he considers his economic advisers, including former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.

"Do you want to keep it and invest it in your future, or have it taken by the most liberal person to ever run for the presidency and the Democratic leaders - the most liberal, who have been running Congress for the past two years, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid?" McCain went on, to boos. "You know, my friends, this is a dangerous threesome."

As opposed to the party that started a war under false pretenses, crashed the global economy and destroyed our children's future, I wonder what it is he thinks the Democrats could do to make it worse.

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McCain likes to mention former EBay CEO Meg Whitman as someone he goes to for economic advice, even floating her as a possible Treasury Secretary. Yesterday he said this:

And next to him is a person well known to most Americans, Meg Whitman, the founder of EBay. I often like to repeat, 12 years ago, there was five employees, and now 1.3 million people around the globe making a living off of EBay.

John? Whitman joined eBay as CEO in 1998, three years after it was founded by Pierre Omidyar, a Barack Obama supporter.